Dance Away with Me(90)

For a while, she hung out by the nursery. She gazed through the window at the wizened newborns. Wren already looked different—plumper, more observant. Tess needed her baby.

She took the elevator to cardiology and drank a cup of hospital coffee in the waiting room. The soothing squeak of sneakers on the tile floors, the soft hum of conversation, the familiar smell of disinfectant did nothing to relax her. She’d be okay. She’d be safe in another field where she wouldn’t have to fear hemorrhaging mothers. It would work out. It had to.

Her community meeting was at eight. She should never have put up that sign. Tempest’s sex education curriculum wasn’t her battle to fight. She’d call Phish. Make him take down the sign and tell everyone she was sick. And then she’d—

Run away again? Wasn’t that what she’d been doing? She’d tried to run away from her grief by moving here. She’d run away from her profession by working at the Broken Chimney. She’d even been running away from admitting to herself that she’d fallen in love with Ian North.

It was true. She loved this difficult damaged man who wanted only solitude. Instead of confronting her feelings head on, she had focused on Wren, on her job, on the teenagers—anything that would let her keep running away from the painful reality that she’d fallen in love with a man who would never love her back.

That was over now. Losing Trav had been unexpected, but losing Ian . . . ? She’d never had him to begin with. From now on, she’d be clear-eyed. No more running away, not even from tonight’s meeting.

She left cardiology and found Savannah holed up in the labor and delivery waiting room. “Mom was stressing me out,” Savannah explained.

“I need to borrow your car. You can ride back with your dad when he gets here.”

“You want to leave?”

“Your mother’s in good hands, and I have to get back.”

“You can’t go yet,” Savannah said, in her customary belligerent fashion. “What if something happens?”

Tess’s nerves shredded. “If something happens, nobody is going to come running to me. I’m a murderer, remember?”

The word hung in the air between them. Savannah dropped her gaze. “I never said that.”

Tess stared out the window at the parking lot below.

Savannah spoke softly. “I can’t get hold of Dad. Somebody has to stay with me.”

Her disagreeable co-worker’s neediness got to her, and Tess settled in to wait.

The baby, a seven-pound, eight-ounce healthy boy, wasn’t born until dinnertime, less than half an hour after Michelle’s husband, Dave, arrived. Savannah dragged Tess with her to meet her new brother. Tess said all the right things, and then quickly excused herself. If she left now, she’d have just enough time to pull herself together and get changed before the meeting. She reiterated her request for Savannah’s car keys.

“I’m not hanging around here,” Savannah said. “We can go back together.”

“I need to hurry.”

Savannah dug the heel of her hand into her back and rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah. You’ve got your big meeting tonight. Good luck with that.”

If Tess had thought Savannah’s brief show of vulnerability would change anything, she’d been proven wrong.

Savannah took so long talking to her father, badgering her exhausted mother, and waddling to the parking garage that Tess thought they’d never get to the car. Forget having a chance to decompress, let alone take a shower. She’d be lucky to throw on clean clothes.

She grabbed the keys. “I’ll drive. You need to rest.”

They were barely past the hospital entrance before they hit a construction delay. Savannah stretched in the passenger seat to ease her back. “I can’t believe how crazy Mom was. I mean, I know she’s crazy, but I didn’t expect her to be that crazy.”

“She was afraid.”

“I’d die before I acted like that. I have my pride.”

“Women labor in different ways.” Tess drummed her fingers on the steering wheel as the traffic inched forward. Forget changing her clothes. At this rate, the best she could hope for was getting to the meeting on time. If she didn’t, everyone in town would think she’d lost her courage.

*

They arrived at the Broken Chimney three minutes after eight. Tess’s hopes that no one would attend were squashed when she saw that all the parking spaces in front were taken. She pulled up and got out, leaving Savannah to fend for herself.

The place was packed, with the overflow standing wherever there was floor space. She recognized many of the coffee shop regulars, along with the parents of a few of the high school kids. Not unexpectedly, Brad and Kelly had taken over a table toward the middle of the room. Imani’s and Jordan’s families were there. Old Mr. Felder had shown up. So had Artie. Courtney was pouting into her phone’s camera, looking for the best angle, and Phish was behind the counter, dishing up ice cream and pie as fast as he could manage. Tess spotted some of the retirees in the crowd, all of whom should be long past worrying about teenagers getting pregnant. This had turned into a circus, and she was the primary exhibit.

The crowd gradually quieted as they spotted her. Instead of feeling professional and authoritative, she was out of breath, disheveled, and rattled in her oldest jeans and a coffee-stained T-shirt. The brush of makeup she’d applied that morning had worn off, and her hair was a rat’s nest. She looked around for Ian but didn’t see him anywhere. She swallowed her disappointment.